Archive for July, 2009

Yipee! The Provincial Government and the Federal Government of Canada have worked out a deal to harmonize the PST and GST.

I’ve hated the PST ever since Perceptus Solutions Inc. has had collect and remit PST (Wow, Perceptus is more than 5 years old!). For the uninitiated, PST is intimidating to understand, and bothersome to put into practice.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about how much companies will save by harmonizing the PST. It is absolutely not true that companies will save 7% of their expenses. It is a topic for another day, but I list some things that Perceptus does and does not do with PST below, and it’ll make it clear that we do not magically gain 7% net profit. However, many companies will save a lot. But, more importantly, there’s less paperwork to handle, fewer regulations to puzzle over, and fewer phone calls to the Province to try and figure out what is exempt or not exempt. This means that BC based businesses can spend more time creating, building, and improving themselves to do things better, cheaper, and faster – things which will help all BC residents in hard to measure ways in the hazy future.

For those who have never dealt with PST behind the scenes, I can tell you from both personal experience, that the experiences of some of our customers, that PST has always been a royal pain compared to the GST.

GST in practice: We get charged GST. We charge GST. We remit the net amount to Ottawa.

Perceptus is charged GST on almost all of our inputs, the ADSL that resell under the IvyDSL.com banner, our computer gear, office supplies, cellphones, automobile expenses, etc.

Similarly, we charge GST on everything we sell to Canadian companies and individuals. However, our business customers don’t really care, because they also claim GST inputs to net out their GST payments.

We send to the federal government the difference between what we collected and what we paid in GST. It’s easy to calculate, and we’re indifferent to whether GST goes up or down, it just doesn’t significantly affect our bottom line – we just collect on behalf of the government.

PST on the other hand: We sometimes get charged by suppliers. We sometimes don’t get charged. We sometimes charge our customers. We sometimes don’t charge. Often, both scenarious are on a single invoice! We remit to Victoria whatever we happened to charge. “Huh?” is right.

Perceptus is charged PST on some of the things we need to run the business.

ADSL that we resell: Excluded. We are a reseller; however, we had to send documentation of such. But, any lines we use for our own purposes, we have to calculate separately and self-assess PST.

Most gear, and supplies: Charged. Paper, computers, coffee, cellphones, etc. The more we use, the higher our PST expenses, and the higher our costs. That all get’s figured into the prices we quote to our customers.

Some, but not all service providers would be charged PST too. We don’t use many outside services, so I won’t elaborate too much.

Perceptus charges our customers on some things but not others.

ADSL, under our IvyDSL.com banner, we do charge our customers PST.

Website subscriptions and our packaged software are charged PST.

Perceptus does not have to charge for other items

If we write a custom report, setup a network, design a webpage or other “custom” work, it’s a service, and there’s no PST.

Further, if we were to write a custom tool to work with one of our packaged items, e.g. an enhanced feature for Bean Counting, our inventory counting system, we would not have to charge PST on the custom work, but we would have to charge PST on the “packaged” software.

If for some reason we were to wholesale a product, we wouldn’t need to charge PST, but we’d need to track our reseller’s PST info.

The list goes on. It’s maddening.

Yes, harmonizing the PST will initially cause the price of some items to go up for consumers. Yes, some industries will be negatively affected, such as restaurants. Yes, I think the provincial government is doing a bit of a tax grab here – I believe other provinces reduced the total harmonized tax by at least a percent when they moved to the HST. But overall, HST is not a bad thing – granted, we’re fortunate to be on the side that generally benefits from the HST. I suspect that the province will try and tip tax revenues back towards businesses from consumers a bit by adjusting personal and corporate income taxes – or at least they should, because the consumers are clearly taking a hit on the HST.

At Perceptus, I’m just glad to have less regulation to wrap my head around. And as a taxpayer, I’m glad that the provincial government has less paperwork to process.

It’s always caught me off guard… it’s already back to school time for some parts of North America.

So, for those whose summer break is already coming to an end, here’s a reminder of Print-Bingo.com’s template bingo design for Back to School Bingo. It’s a great way to help ease kids back into the learning state of mind. So, if you have a class of restless students, try our Back to School Bingo Cards.

You can customize our designs through your web browser, so you can do some prep work from home and finish it off at work. It’s super flexible.

I have this recurring problem at one client’s site. The setup is a small Windows 2003 Terminal Server environment, with remote POS terminals over the Internet – I don’t like this arrangement for the many single points of failure (a couple ADSL lines, a couple routers, a couple switches, a single server, etc.), but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

This client is happens to be running BBL, AKA WinPOS, AKA, WinBPS, over Terminal Server. I have no comment on the software itself, it’s the arrangement of using it over Terminal Server over the Internet that makes me nervous – no, I had no input into this setup.

A further complication, is that the printers that the software uses, Zebra, label/ticket printers, have poor drivers that I don’t believe to be TS compatible. They sometimes get stuck when the remote session is closed. This eventually screws up the Windows spooler service.

When this system stops working, new Remote Desktop sessions fail to start properly. After logging into the server, I will check the processor usage in Task Manager. If the spoolsvc.exe process is using a lot of processor time, this is what I do:

N.B. Follow at Your Own Risk.

Stop the spooler service (no one will be able to print, but they probably can’t already):

net stop spooler

Open RegEdit.exe and browse to this part of the registry:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\PRINT\PRINTERS\

At times, I’ll find dozens of stale Terminal Server printers listed.

Export the registry keys first, to make a backup, just in case.

Then delete the Terminal Server printers from that same part of the registery, do NOT delete the local printers. These are the ones with the “…on MyComputer … in session…” within the printer name.

Deleting these has worked for this particular server several times to resolve the CPU hogging spooler service (spoolsv.exe)… but sometimes they can’t be deleted in RegEdit.

Grab a copy of RegDelNull by Systernals, it’s free as in beer.

Use RegDelNull.exe to remove some of the entries that would not delete manually – I’m looking at you Mr. Zebra Printer Driver.

I care about email security and transparency of email content a lot. I deal with it all the time as a contractor who produces a email newsletters for local retailers. I’m also the guy who teaches end users (including family) to be extremely skeptical about all the email they receive because 90% of it is fake, SPAM, and scams.

So, I get peeved when larger firms do email communications wrong.

Today I received an email invite from a company claiming to do work for Fido. I think it’s cringe-worthy.

My first step in my research was a quick glance at the Fido homepage – no mention of a new survey program, though, I didn’t really expect to find one.

Looking strictly at the email itself then, here are some tidbits:

Subject line: Invitation to Join the Fido Listens Panel

OK so far.

From: Fido Listens Team <fidolistens@itracks.com>

Who is iTracks.com? I’ve certainly never heard of them. Definitely a yellow caution flag.

The email copy talks about a survey and some prizes for participating in Fido’s latest customer feedback thing.

A lot of scams offer prizes or financial incentives. Can you get two yellow caution flags? Or maybe just upgrade to a larger one.

The survey link goes to https://surveys.itracks.com/survey/RogersFido_4?ID=xxxxxxx.

Well, iTracks.com hosts the survey. Their homepage looks legitimate at least. Funny, I was expecting iTracks.com to be an online MP3 store.

And a support email address of support@fidolistens.ca.

Wait, now what is fidolistens.ca? More on Fido Listens later on.

And a contact mail address of Ipsos Reid, a well respected research firm based in Vancouver.

Ah! I’ve heard of them. Actually, I know people who have worked there. Of course, anyone can write an email with someone else’s legitimate mail address.

So, let’s review. Yes, I am a Fido cellphone user. But who is iTracks.com? Do I really believe that they got my email address from Fido? Who is FidoListens.ca? And is IPSOS really involved?

fidolistens.ca? At least this was somewhat comforting. The vanity domain of fidolistens.ca forwards to https://iaf.ipsos.ca…, i.e. a page belonging to IPSOS and transparently hosted by them on their own domain.

In the end, I feel comfortable doing a survey that is hosted by IPSOS. But that’s only because I know that IPSOS Reid is a legitimate firm. A little over a year ago I ranted about another Fido survey attempt in my blog post, How to Properly Use 3rd Party Web Services, I didn’t feel comfortable with the firm conducting that survey.

If you are using a 3rd party firm for surveys or anything that is customer related, please make it easy to verify that it’s legitimate. At Papaya Polls, we offer to host our pages under your own subdomain. It works great and it is very confidence inspiring. I would have zero hesitation in doing a survey which had a web address of http://fidolistens.fido.ca or http://surveys.fido.ca.